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Hanks and Streep bust Watergate in advance in Spielberg's too dry The Post |
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Meryl Streep (Katharine Graham), Tom Hanks (Ben
Bradlee), Sarah Paulson (Tony Bradlee), Bob Odenkirk (Ben Bagdikian), Tracy
Letts (Fritz Beebe), Bradley Whitford (Arthur Parsons), Bruce Greenwood (Robert
McNamara), Matthew Rhys (Daniel Ellsberg), Alison Brie (Lally Graham), Carrie
Coon (Meg Greenfield), Jesse Plemons (Roger Clark), David Cross (Howard
Simons), Michael Stuhlbarg (AM Rosenthal)
There are few things newspaper journalists like more than
old-fashioned films about the glory days of the press, showing journalists to
be uniformly noble, upstanding, seekers of truth. There are few things Hollywood
likes more than films the feature Streep and Hanks and/or are directed by
Spielberg. As such, it’s not really a surprise that The Post received laudatory reviews, or that it crept into the Best
Picture list of 2017 (it only got one other nomination, inevitably for Streep).
The film covers the Washington
Post’s decision in 1971 to publish details from the Pentagon Papers,
originally leaked to the New York Times
by former Defence Department official Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys). The
papers detail the American government’s deceptive public messages on Vietnam, a
war they knew to be unwinnable for almost ten years. The Nixon administration has
blocked publication in the New York Times,
but when the Post gets the same
papers, owner and publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben
Bradlee (Tom Hanks) have a difficult decision to make – suppress the truth or
publish and face crippling legal penalties that could destroy the business.
The Post is quite
similar in many ways to Spielberg’s Lincoln
– a rather po-faced history lesson, told with panache, but essentially a dry
civics lesson which draws some neat, but a little too on point, parallels with
current events. Certainly it’s clear whom we are meant to be thinking of when the
camera shows a shadowy Nixon in long shot from outside the White House, ranting
into a phone in the Oval office late at night (admittedly, in a nice touch, the
film uses the actual audio from Nixon’s Oval Office recordings). The parallels
between press freedom and the spin of politics (or the charges of Fake News
flung at any story the powers that be don’t like) are pretty clear. They are
also pretty obvious.
Part of the film’s problem is that, unlike All the President’s Men (where the story
covers full investigative journalism and Woodward and Bernstein need to piece
the story together against the odds), this film hands everything to the
journalists on a plate. It doesn’t even try to put a puzzle or some form of
mystery before the viewers. Instead, the history is painstakingly (and drily)
explained to give us the context, then each stage of the Post getting the papers is shown in simple and rather undramatic
steps. There isn’t a sense – despite Bob Odenkirk’s deputy editor doing a bit
of legwork – that the Post needed to
work that hard to land the story. Crikey, you can see why The Times (who really did the crack the story) were a bit pissed at
the film stealing their glory.
Once the papers are in the Post’s hands, the story almost immediately jumps to one night in
which the papers are read and the board and the journalists squabble over
whether they can legally publish or not. After that we get a swift coda where
everything turns out fine, backs are slapped and the Supreme Court says it’s
all good. There just isn’t quite enough drama. In fact we feel like we are
watching a footnote, rather than the real story, which seems to be happening on
the margins (for starters, the scandal of government lies on Vietnam, how The New York Times broke the story, and
the Watergate break-in, a recreation of which rather clumsily closes the
picture).
And I get that the film is trying to tell a story about how
important a free press is and, yes, it’s great – but despite having a number of
characters talk at length about this, I’m not sure what the film really tells
us that we don’t already know. Instead it moves methodically but swiftly
through events, carefully telling us what happened but never turning it into a
really compelling story. Pizzazz for its own sake is not a strength, but a
little more oomph in delivery here
might have helped.
Alongside this, the film also wants to make points about the
struggle of a woman in a man’s world and the institutional sexism (that
probably hasn’t changed that much) of many boardrooms. Meryl Streep’s Katharine
Graham – having inherited the company after the suicide of her husband – is a
brow-beaten woman struggling to impose herself in a room of men whom she feels inferior
to. Even this plotline though feels slightly rushed – we have Graham cowering
in a boardroom meeting and struggling with paperwork, next thing we know she
hesitantly makes the call to publish and is facing down her chief opponent
(Bradley Whitford, rolling out another of his arrogant men of privilege). It’s
all a bit rushed, perfunctory and all as expected – and Streep can clearly play
this sort of role standing on her head.
But then the whole film has this slight comfort job feeling
about it – everyone clearly invested in the story and the importance of the
film’s points, but clearly without being challenged by the content. By the end
of the film we’re are awash with clichés, from newspaper print rolling through
old machines, to Graham walking through a crowd of admiring women outside the
Supreme Court. The interesting and well assembled cast don’t get enough to do,
with many of them feeling slightly wasted, not least Sarah Paulson in a
thankless role as “the wife”.
The Post wants to
be a big, world-changing film that talks about our modern age. Instead it’s a
very middle brow, middle of the road history lesson that flatters to deceive,
entertaining enough just about, but immediately forgettable.
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